ActiveCampaign vs Kartra Comparison 2026
Both cover email marketing & automation. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
Email automation with a CRM underneath it
Courses, funnels and email with a cart attached
At a glance
- ActiveCampaign starts cheaper, at $15.
- Neither has a free tier.
- ActiveCampaign bills annually only, so there is no month to try it for.
- ActiveCampaign takes no share of what you earn. Kartra takes 5%.
Side by side
ActiveCampaign | Kartra | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price (they differ) | From $15 | From $59 |
| Pricing model | Paid subscription | Paid subscription |
| Free tier | No | No |
| Billing (they differ) | Annual only | Monthly or annual |
| Free trial | Not stated | Not stated |
| API | Not stated | Yes |
| Data export |
ActiveCampaign
Email automation with a CRM underneath it
ActiveCampaign is what people move to when the sequences outgrow a newsletter tool, and its conditional logic goes deeper than anything at this price. The CRM underneath means a sponsor conversation and a subscriber record are the same object. It takes a weekend to learn, and the cheapest plan caps automations at five actions, which is not enough to try the thing it is good at.
Our note
Budget for Plus rather than Starter. The five-action cap on the cheapest plan blocks exactly the branching logic that justifies choosing ActiveCampaign over a newsletter tool, and discovering that after migrating a list is a bad afternoon.
Kartra
Courses, funnels and email with a cart attached
Kartra sells the whole stack in one subscription: pages, checkout, email, membership and the course itself, with everything wired together on arrival. The trade is stated plainly on the pricing page, because the cheapest plan takes five percent of what you sell. Contact limits are the other constraint and they bind sooner than most people expect. Anybody with an email platform they like is paying twice.
Our note
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.